Sept. 11, 2000

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Insurer Seeks To Combine Various Technology Functions

By George V. Hulme

he insurance industry has seen its share of consolidation during the last few years, and melding disparate systems from acquired companies is no easy task. That's certainly been the case for Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc.

In March 1997, Marsh & McLennan purchased Johnson and Higgins for $1.8 billion and followed that with the buyout of Sedgwick Group plc in London in November 1998 for $2.05 billion. Since then, "we've been working diligently on building technology's contribution to our organization, and synergizing the technology from what had been three separate companies," says Gary Lasko, managing director at Marsh & McLennan. "We've done a heck of a job driving costs out of the technology infrastructure and supporting the consolidation of offices and business functions, consolidating E-mail, knowledge management, databases, and client-data information repositories, as well as our transaction-processing system."

Marsh & McLennan operates in three regions--the United States, Europe, and Asia Pacific--and Lasko says consolidating the transaction-processing systems of each group proved the most daunting challenge.

The U.S. transaction processing system was based on an IBM AS/400 application developed in the late 1980s. Europe was using a 12-year-old legacy mainframe application, and Asia Pacific was based on a client-server transaction application. The only common thread among the transaction-processing systems was that they all tied into an Oracle back-end system.

"One of the most satisfying projects was being able to consolidate client-specific data, and the business base transactions that go along with trying to service clients and processing business and billing for policies and consulting projects," Lasko says. "We literally had to pull the data back to regional centers and go through the whole matching of clients to make sure we eliminated duplicate clients."

Return to main story, "Premium Put On Web Initiatives."

Illustration by Jeffrey Fisher

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